The Thistle

Even if I was in the butcher shop display
Exposed and cut to bits like a poor piece of beef 
Even so my boss, nostrils florid may
With a gloomy eye, onion and chervil await 

Even so my stomach, guts all uncoiled 
Would open up, all bloody to curiosity
Even so my heart so ornately plated 
Would join it with my brain, my liver and kidney 

No one would know where in among all my cutlets 
My viscera and offal 
The thistle which flowers sown there by the conquests
Which none will ever uproot  

The lively thistle which plants these roots down
In this soil most arid and this soil full of lime
The thistle, pitiless, which scrapes its spiny crown
Toward the rough parallel pains in time